The Truth About Managing People, Third Edition

Truth 2. Forget Traits; It’s Behavior That Counts!

You’re interviewing applicants to fill a job position in your firm. What are you looking for in these applicants? If you’re like many managers, you’ll answer with terms such as hardworking, persistent, confident, and dependable. After all, how can you go wrong trying to hire people with traits such as these? Well, you can! The problem is that traits aren’t necessarily good predictors of future job performance.

Most of us have a strong belief in the power of traits to predict behavior. We know that people behave differently in different situations, but we tend to classify people by their traits, impose judgments about those traits (being self-assured is “good”; being submissive is “bad”), and ...